Cause I'm Gonna Be Free and I'm Gonna Be Fine (maybe not tonight)
by mosylu
Summary: Jyn is having a rough night, and goes to see Cassian in the hospital wing.


Title from Florence + the Machine's "Delilah" for my musical prompts series on Tumblr.

* * *

If a droid could sound resigned, this one did. "Sergeant Erso, you are not permitted in the medical wing at this hour."

"Bite me," Jyn suggested.

The droid whirred plaintively. "That is not a recommended course of treatment."

She didn't imagine it was, even if the patient presented with a wicked case of bloody-mindedness. She pushed past the droid, who repeated, "Sergeant Jyn Erso, you are not permitted in the medica - "

She swatted a door shut behind her, cutting it off.

The inhabitant of the private room stirred in his bed, blinking his eyes open. "Hey," she whispered. "Sorry."

"Mmmm," Cassian mumbled, flicking his fingers as if to wave off the piffling inconvenience of being woken in the middle of the night by slamming doors when you were recovering from major surgery. He blinked a few more times, then focused on her. "The plans?"

It was what she'd asked the moment she'd opened her eyes in the hospital wing, a week ago.

Missing, she'd been told. Captured, along with Princess Leia Organa. Back in the hands of the Empire, when they'd gone so far, sacrificed so many, to wrest them away.

She had to shake her head. "Nothing."

He gave a little nod. He'd asked the same when she'd come to see him earlier today, and every time before that. She was pretty sure he asked it of anyone he saw, if only because she had, too.

"How are you feeling?"

An edge of his mouth kicked up. "Like I broke three ribs, bruised my spine, dislocated my knee, and ruptured my spleen."

"I hope you also feel well-drugged."

He shrugged. "Drugged enough."

She strongly suspected he turned down a lot of painkillers simply because he wanted to be awake and aware. But the lines around his mouth and eyes were soft tonight, so she didn't pursue it.

She nibbled her lips. She hadn't planned on waking him up, although she'd known there was a chance he would if he sensed another person in the room. "Want me to go?"

They'd been cautious with each other since Scarif. Shy, after the singularity of purpose that had driven them in their mad suicide mission, after the way they'd opened up to each other on the beach when they'd thought their lives had dwindled to a handful of seconds. There was something tender and delicate between them now, and she was often afraid to push it too hard for fear it would tear.

He shook his head against the pillow, rumpling his hair. "Stay."

She pulled a chair up next to his bed and sat down. She braced one booted foot up against the frame of his bed, pestering a frayed spot on the knee of her pants. She felt his eyes on her and looked up. "Insomnia," she said, explaining her presence, and went back to picking at the frayed spot, plucking little strings out from the edges of the the expanding hole.

That was not a one hundred percent accurate explanation.

She'd dreamed she held the plans again. She'd felt the weight of them on her belt loop, bouncing on her hip; she'd heard her father's voice in their codename. They had been safe, tied to her. When she'd woken to find herself free of them, she'd cried, pushing her face into the thin pillow so as not to wake her bunkmates.

Why had she ever let them go?

Why had she escaped and they had not? She would rather it was the other way around.

( _Would you also trade Cassian for the plans?_ a voice asked, and she ignored it.)

(She did not, somehow, want to consider that.)

His fingers brushed her calf. She looked down at him.

"They'll be found," he told her.

"I wish I had your faith," she said.

It had all seemed so clear before. So simple.

Faith was harder to sustain here and now, with the plans gone, but the knowledge of the Death Star's power seared into the pattern of her nightmares. With so many dead back on Scarif, their blood fused into the glass that had been the sandy beaches, for nothing. With Cassian flat on his back and his insides barely reassembled. With their other friends all in various stages of recovery elsewhere in the hospital wing, and K-2 a pile of rubble in the larger rubble of the data archives, and his backup stored in some distant data lockup.

With her unable to _do_ anything.

They had people on it, Mon Mothma said. A rescue mission mounted, trying to find where the Princess was being held, trying to find out what she'd done with the plans.

Maybe that was enough for Cassian, but it wasn't enough for her.

He lifted up his arm and set his hand over hers on her knee.

She was not a hand holder; never had been since Lah'mu. But his hand was warm and solid and she held it like a lifeline, even though he was the one still recovering.

With a little grunt, he folded up his arm, carrying her hand with it. To her shock, he touched his lips to her fingers.

"They will be found," he repeated. "What your father did; what we did. What they did. It will not be in vain."

She held his hand, feeling the tingle of his lips on her skin, and thought that maybe faith could be carried between two.

FINIS


End file.
